Matthew Yglesias argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to economic growth is under-acknowledged.
bq. Whatever their flaws, the fact of the matter is that the economic growth they’ve presided over has been the greatest force for betterment of material living standards in all of human history. That’s no small thing!
If a new _APSR_ “article”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=8239875 is to be believed, this is a significant change from the incentives of party officials in the old days.
bq. Using excessive grain procurement as a pertinent measure, we find that such variations were patterned systematically on the political career incentives of Communist Party officials rather than the conventionally assumed ideology or personal idiosyncrasies. Political rank alone can explain 16.83% of the excess death rate: the excess procurement ratio of provinces governed by alternate members of the Central Committee was about 3% higher than in provinces governed by full members, or there was an approximate 1.11% increase in the excess death rate.
Xavier Marquez provides an “excellent summary”:http://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/04/careerists-and-ideologues-in-chinas.html of the article’s underlying argument.
bq. In the hierarchy of the CCP, the three highest levels are politburo members, full members of the central committee, and alternate members of the central committee. The politburo is tiny – about 20 people. … most of them were founding members of the CCP, had gone through the Long March, or had otherwise participated extensively in guerrilla activities before 1949. … it was possible to move from alternate membership to full membership in the Central Committee, a larger body of about 300 or so people … and this move brought substantial material and status benefits. Yet in order to move from alternate to full membership, one had to give sufficient indications of commitment and reliability. In this case, Mao indicated that rewards would come to those who signalled credible radicalism, and credible radicalism could only be signalled by excessive grain procurement, leading to famine. … since these full members could not move any further up the hierarchy … once they reached the top they became less ideological.
Xavier also has a very interesting argument about how you move from “the signalling equilibrium where crazy radicalism is rewarded to the signalling equilibrium where other things (e.g., “measured economic performance”) are rewarded, as China has moved” but for that, you’ll have to click the link (which you should do in any event – it is one of the most consistently interesting blogs out there).